MEMORA-BEALE-IA

​Long before its Jan. 23, 1969 groundbreaking, a debate was already raging to do away with Dallas’ only commemoration of President Kennedy’s violent death. Disapproving descriptors fueled the dispute, like: “It’s a Lego-like monstrosity of pre-cast concrete!” “Kennedy deserved better than a cold, poorly done and unimpressive eyesore.”

Five decades later, critics, columnists and taxpayers are still petitioning to tear down the austere and boxy monument.

With the widowed first lady’s blessing, architect Philip Johnson donated his design for the empty tomb, or “cenotaph”: a 50-by- 50-foot open-air concrete room containing a black-granite slab bearing the president’s name. One can’t behold a gigantic tomb without communing over life’s destruction. The assassination will always evoke a deep sense of guilt, and removing Johnson’s memorial would only rip open old wounds.

Instead of replacing the cenotaph, what if Dallas simply embraced it?

Perhaps if the monument were imbued with a gloriously strange, daffy woman dancing in her “revolutionary costume.”

This “214 Trans4m” installment was shot on the 47th anniversary of the assassination. Richard D. Curtin resurrects Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale. Little Edie was an unstable beauty — a daughter who imitated her mother’s rebellion against bourgeois conformity. She was also Jacqueline Bouvier’s cousin (Edie’s mom is the sister of Jackie’s father, John Vernou Bouvier III.)

While there was a 12-year age gap, the Bouvier cousins shared the same aristocratic accent and summered together at the Beale’s estate, Grey Gardens in East Hampton, NY. During those summers, however, the Bouvier who attracted the most attention was Little Edie, known as “Body Beautiful Beale.” But fate drove one cousin to the top and condemned the other to near-obscurity.

Little Edie is the quintessence of the “Southern belle” (by way of Manhattan) — a debutante whose name was in the social register. But her mother, whom Little Edie nursed until her dying day, kept Little Edie down on the farm.

Dallas’ memorial and Grey Gardens are similarly maligned.

The village fathers of East Hampton desperately tried to drive out the Beales from the vine-covered mansion. It was overrun with cats, lacked running water and had just one working toilet. The Suffolk County Board of Health ruled that the house was “unfit for human habitation” and ordered an immediate eviction hearing. But cousin Jackie helped restore the house to order.

Perhaps Little Edie’s devotion to architecture could inspire Dallas. Even when she was destitute and her greatest dream was to break free from the exile that Grey Gardens had became, Edie adamantly promised that ruined estate would only be sold on the condition that it not be demolished.​Edie lived up to her word: Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and wife Sally Quinn have immaculately preserved Grey Gardens.